Cut cash to Italy's universities

A TV programme broadcast nationwide on one of Italy's 3 state networks has highlighted the continuing brain drain of young talent from Italy in search of honest recognition. But, says David Petrie, the programme didn’t go nearly far enough

Ten years ago, on 13 July 1995, the European Parliament passed a resolution during its Strasbourg plenary condemning the University of Verona for abusing the human rights of its non-Italian teaching staff, the so-called lettori, by attempting to “disappear” them. The Verona case remains an ongoing  disgrace, blighting the much vaunted EU single market’s commitment to free movement of workers. The Wall Street Journal and the BBC sent journalists to Verona to investigate, but the Italian media chose not to report this disgrace despite the fact that the abuses complained of in Verona were found, by the European Parliament in subsequent resolutions, to be present as a rule in most Italian universities. [1] [2]

Judgements (4 in all) of the European Court of Justice in favour of the lettori  have yet to be fully implemented.

Recently the leftist leaning state owned RAI television channel in Italy showed a documentary on the lamentable state of the country’s universities. Young ambitious and talented  Italians are forced to abandon their academic careers and head for places like the cold shores of  Denmark.

Why? Because Italian universities cannot accommodate them, because corrupt barons use the recruiting procedures to sistemare or set up sinecures for their sons and daughters and friends, because no matter how good your cv is your entry into the system depends on preferment  through raccomandazione of a baron and finally because the 10% of the hard-working genuine academics are at best indifferent to the corruption and at worst too wimpish and selfish to challenge it. So rotten is the system that you can draw a family tree showing fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, cousins, in-laws and ex-schoolmates all working in the same university. A veritable knot of toads.

The makers of the programme are to be congratulated for shining a torch on this scam which  feeds the bloated appetites and egos of a  loathsome category of university barons who deprive youth of an education, whilst obviously initiating them in the apparent advantages of being morally compromised and corrupted, because they have “connections”.

Whereas in most European universities, when all other things are equal, sexual favours or knowing someone inside the system might help to tip the balance in your favour, in Italy it is the only real factor which counts in getting you a fixed post. Only a political numpty applies for a job he has not been promised. So they talk of the post created for ‘Maria’ and the post created for ‘Luigi’. Should anyone  be naïve enough to apply, flashing his/her superior cv at the “examiners” of Maria’s  rigged concorso, this impertinence and stupidity will be noted as disrespectful of the system and the candidate’s chances of a job will be set back 10 years until he or she learns the rules.

As the programme showed, the problem is not Italians but Italy; there are any number of Italians who make it to the top in European and American Universities, where real competition exists.

The sooner young talented Italian kids pack their bags and head for other EU countries the better – they will be a credit to the EU, to themselves and to Italy.

One boss of a science institution admitted that their research wasn’t up to much and the camera crew filmed the primitive working conditions, as he shrugged his shoulders about the lack of funding. The programme ended  with a shot of the smiling faces of the bright young  Italians who had abandoned their country. The dreamy inference we were supposed to draw was “if only, if only…”. If only Silvio Berlusconi  would invest in our future.

And this is where the programme falters. There is little chance that extra cash would be invested in the 10% of good guys; it would simply be gobbled up by the insatiable appetites of the corrupt.

I am not in a position to criticise the workings of science faculties in Italy, but I am assured that many people try to do a good job under difficult circumstances. This is not the case in the faculties of languages and literature whose continued existence is by any objective comparative worldwide study impossible to justify.

An Italian language or literature  “professor” does as little as 2 hours and 15 minutes teaching for 30 weeks of the year. Need I continue, or may I rest my case here?

Some double up and do 5 hours per week to get teaching out of the way in 15 weeks of the 52 week year  At the middle of his career a professor will take home in excess of 4 thousand euros a month. Most “research” is subsidised by the state and their books do not sell on the open market because only an “anxious-to-please, desperate-to-pass” student would dream of buying them.

Since Italy’s language faculties declared war on its lettori a system of apartheid has been introduced. Ghettoes for the foreign lettori  called Linguistic Centres have been created separating them from Italian teaching staff who are paid the double and treble for work deemed by the courts to be equivalent. Students are obliged to pass tests with lettori and exams with the real (i.e. Italian) teachers. The results are disastrous. Everyone agrees that standards have plummeted.

The faculties cannot produce employable graduates fluent in two languages. They are not simply redundant, but pernicious, since they create false hopes in the young. Their funding should be cut unless they can reform themselves and justify their existence; if they can’t they should  be closed down. If they have to be closed, the taxpayer will be the long-term beneficiary and the dinosaurs can slope off into retirement on their ludicrously over-generous pensions until they become extinct.

Italy is feeling the squeeze and Berlusconi’s proposed reform of the universities is sensible in that it is attempting to abolish tenure and starve the parasites of cash. He should be supported in this. But maybe even business-minded Berlusconi does not have the wherewithal to tackle these robber-barons.

He should also bring the lettori (who do 90% of the teaching) into line with European law before daily fines of almost three hundred and ten thousand euros, proposed by the European Commission, give him another financial headache. [3]

Note: This article was first published by JUST Response on July 12 2005. David Petrie is chairman of the ALLSI foreign language lecturers' association based in Verona, Italy.

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